


metronome waves

by rensshi



Category: THE9 (Band), 青春有你2 | Youth With You 2 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:55:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26106799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rensshi/pseuds/rensshi
Summary: Four years ago, they’d been in Beijing before Hong Kong's Shatterdome; when Wang Chengxuan had been a recruit too and Yu Yan was only just trying to grasp certain things.The war clock ticks. The rest will spin itself into place.
Relationships: Wang Chengxuan/Yu Yan, Yu Yan & Liu Yuxin (Idol Producer)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 29
Collections: Girl Group Jukebox - Mixtape Round





	metronome waves

**Author's Note:**

> **written for GG Jukebox Mixtape Round, inspired by Drew Barrymore by SZA.**   
>    
>  kwoon - combat room  
> shatterdome - hq for the corps and the jaegers in various locations  
> kaijus - monsters (simply put), usually given names and categories, similar to how hurricanes are identified  
> jaeger - giant war machines aka mecha meant to fight kaijus. all of them have a variety of their own weapons, eg. the plasmacaster gun.  
> drifting - when co-pilots/rangers share a headspace and neural connection between each other to be able to pilot a jaeger together for battle  
> 
> 
> **warnings** for references to loss and dealing with past grief. pls suspend your disbelief from the inaccuracies in this fic with the rest of the pacrim canon and lore of how jaeger tech works, yu yan's tattoo designs and pretend that she doesn't have any other tattoos other than the one on her back :D drew barrymore might be like the last song appropriate as a whole for this fic but i wrote this out of love for its chorus, sza and the fun time that was the qcyn2 airing period <3 honorary song mentions if you dig the listening experience to accompany the rest of the fic: we all knew - labrinth, 9 - willow, sza.

**"and, as if metronomed by doom, [I] fear the worst, my heart does not stop beating."**

\-- Durga Chew-bose, in Heart Museum from _Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays_

  
  
  


Three weeks after the last reset of the clock in the Shatterdome, Orobos, a category three, had razed a near straight line halfway through Jakarta.

The reason why they needed a new plasmacaster rebuilt is almost entirely Yu Yan’s fault. She and Yuxin had beaten their own record of twenty kills for the price of Echo Saber looking like a real sight for sore eyes with the gaping hole in her right shoulder. The whole fucking arm just got fished out by the corps from somewhere at the bottom of the South China sea. The doctor tells Yu Yan during their monthly sessions, that all Rangers were subjected to so as to try to keep them in optimal mental and emotional condition besides just the physical, that the corps have seen much worse irreparable damage to past Jaegers throughout the years.

In that fight, she’d needed a second’s worth of calculation before the Kaiju raised its stinger tail, and Yuxin had hesitated too. 

Days later, their personal mech team announces that their Jaeger is all fixed up. The high ceiling of the staging deck where she's housed is just pinpricks of light so high up when they look skyward, half eclipsed by the pristine sheen of the helm 250 feet high. 

But Yu Yan just keeps moving to ask one of the other engineers lingering, towards the new girl.

“You’re here,” Yu Yan ends up saying and not asking. Yuxin is in Yu Yan’s periphery, hanging back like she’s on the fringes of a memory she’s glimpsed and probably has anyway: pearly teeth with a little gap next to the canine, the hollowness of an empty combat room at Beijing’s base with dust shimmering in morning light. 

New girl’s eyes go wider, like a rabbit in a dark tunnel that Yu Yan’s just angled a light on. But she smiles back and says, “They moved me to the Hong Kong division after my evals.”

Yu Yan offers her hand anyway for formality's sake, at the same time Yuxin says, “Congrats. It's nice to see you again, Wang Chengxuan.”

Chengxuan brightens, crow’s feet along her eyes deep under the warm lighting when she smiles. 

Four years ago, they’d been at Beijing before the Shatterdome here in Hong Kong: when Wang Chengxuan had been a recruit too and didn’t know yet that she’d end up in J-Tech, while Yu Yan was only just trying to grasp certain things.

Like how she and Yuxin had gotten the green light to be stationed at Hong Kong after the deployment of the new Mark IV Jaegers there.

And how drifting meant there are things that wrap around the frayed edges of your consciousness and persist quietly through the days so you know exactly what’s keeping your partner up at night on the bottom bunk below. After their first fight smack dab next to a dormant volcano in the Philippines, Yu Yan thought she'd smelled acrid smoke and ashes of a different town burned down to the ground, wet green fields, sterile hospitals in the darkness of their room. Liu Yuxin kept her things of sentimental value tucked away in hardbound folders, flattened envelopes. The only piece of jewellery from her parents glinted weak, hung on a nail from her side of the room, and she learns how consuming certain memories can be when sharing minds.

Now, Yu Yan feels Chengxuan’s eyes boring into her when she comes down from the labs on her break to stop by the kwoon. 

“Told you Huang was good,” Chengxuan mutters when Yu Yan swiftly picks up her bomber jacket to fling it aside on the bench after she decides it's too hot to put it back on. She's just had a match point of ten to eight with one of the newer promising recruits, and she's not done yet. 

“Why J-Tech?”

“Hm?”

“You were good at this too,” Yu Yan starts. And she really was, although that didn't matter too much in a real fight. 

“I failed the last round of the psych tests at the time,” Chengxuan explains, her voice flat in the din of wood hitting sharp against the mats behind them. She shakes her head when Yu Yan just feels like she’s grasping straws in the dark trying to respond because these things happened all the time. “After that I figured that I just—I didn't really want to be a Ranger anymore. So I spoke to some people.”

“And then ended up here in Hong Kong.” Yu Yan's mouth curls up when Chengxuan opens and closes her mouth. “It’s good. The weather can be a pain, but you'll like the street food here.”

The next day at lunch, there’s fruit in the mess hall in season mid-year. Yuxin gives half of a mango and longans to Chengxuan to keep her preoccupied and happy as Chengxuan sinks into more stories about the last year she’d spent in Beijing and who’d landed in what division. By the time they get to hear about Su Shanshan and Duan Yixuan in K-Science, the peels of fruit skin are bunched up in a pile on Chengxuan’s tray, Chengxuan’s fingertips sticky from how she’s been eating a lot this time round.

Yu Yan places Chengxuan’s hands next to the little gap in her smile like she's trying to compare things. She's got hands that are suited to taking things apart and fixing things, making them better. Yu Yan thinks it suits her.

  
  
  
  
  


The war clock totaled up to sixteen days on the next attack. 

After taking down a hellish category three that almost makes it to the coastlines around the city, their personal J-Tech team rebuilds their defense shields and makes the suggestion to amp down the charge time for their plasmacaster.

Chengxuan isn’t even on their team and has way more work cut out with Crimson Typhoon's build for the Wei Tang triplets. But Yu Yan visits her room anyway one day to see her work.

“Do you miss Beijing?” Yu Yan asks, looking through Chengxuan’s sheaf of notes and diagrams strewn on her desk and pinned on the wall. 

Chengxuan meets her gaze, curious. “It’s not home to me but sure.” Yu Yan presses down an index finger to Chengxuan’s forehead. “I’m being serious,” Chengxuan says in a small voice, like they’re younger again. 

The humidity throughout the month lifts and the weather reaches the perfect temperature at night, mercifully cooler so they aren’t sweating through their shirts underneath their jackets. Chengxuan doesn’t say much else when she learns about the new sprawling burst of orchids across Yu Yan’s right shoulder blade, added around the old tattoo already there.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs. When she skims her fingertips over the parts exposed over Yu Yan's tank top, Yu Yan feels the phantom pain of the whole process, how the tender ache of it kept her company during the nights she couldn't sleep, and how she'd relished it almost. 

“My mum liked you. Thought you were a good kid,” Yu Yan says, feels her own mouth pull into an easy light smile when Chengxuan looks genuinely surprised.

“Oh,” her voice trails off and it's quiet, just a tad bit awkward. But Yu Yan doesn't really mind. There's something about space being shared like this that feels easier, a general weird comfort in the parts of someone you don't know yet. 

"I had no idea you talked about me," Chengxuan says and Yu Yan lets out a laugh.

"I used to send photos to my mum from Beijing. She thought you looked like you'd never hurt a fly." Yu Yan reaches out to get Chengxuan to shuffle closer from one end of her bed to the other, so Yu Yan can stick her hand into the packet of sweet beef jerky she’s never particularly enjoyed or cared to until recently when Chengxuan insisted on sharing her food stash. She’d convinced Yu Yan to indulge in it.

“Come out with me,” Yu Yan suggests, changing the subject. “I did say the street food here is incredible.”

"You say that with no enthusiasm at all."

"Then you can tell me yourself once you taste some of them."

She learns that Chengxuan has a preference for grilled things and pastries; sharing grilled squid skewered on sticks and pineapple buns makes the experience a lot better. 

“Nah, you’re choosing to spoil yourself, jiejie,” Chengxuan laughs. 

  
  
  
  


Yuxin doesn’t offer much to say needlessly, but she'd left food and crawled into Yu Yan’s bunk to check on her when Yu Yan had gotten the news about her mother. Yu Yan thought Guangzhou was safe from the attacks. Her mother didn’t want to stay in Beijing if Yu Yan wasn’t there and that’s all Yu Yan still thinks about during the days she stays buried under her blankets, unmoving.

Getting to know everything about a stranger at first meant getting unspoken permission to run her fingers through the rest of the photos in Yuxin’s folders and envelopes, but never stopping to linger too long on any one of the photos or letters in them. Yuxin had taken out a photo of her parents standing in front of a school with a girl in her kindergarten toga between them and tacked it onto the wall in front of their only desk, next to Yu Yan’s photographs.

Threading through memories isn’t like sticking your head into the bottom of a well. Memories change, delineate into either something more washed out, or more saturated than it had been years ago. Yu Yan used to have this recurring dream where all she sees are the oval haloed lights of an emergency bunker room, crowded. Sometimes a child cries somewhere, sometimes the ceiling and walls shake. Sometimes, the woman holding her tightly with her face against her chest is not Yuxin's mother, but her own. Sometimes the waterfall in Guizhou in Yuxin's childhood leads to the beach Yu Yan had gotten sunburnt on as a child, ice cream dripping onto her bare sand-caked knees and her mother's pale blue dress she'd worn that day that whipped around in the breeze.

"I think I just want to able to grieve on my own terms," Yu Yan had concluded in front of the doctor, and he'd pushed up his glasses.

"Do you have anything tangible to keep yourself grounded to your mother other than a picture? Something you can at least be able to feel enough or carry with you as a reminder?" He'd asked.

So Yu Yan had let herself take a good long look at the view of this wall with their photos, when she found it in her to get out of bed and take a cold shower. And then she’d grabbed a pad of thin paper to draw out the orchid designs in memory of her loss.

Yu Yan isn’t outwardly religious, and neither is Yuxin really. But there are the small statues on a lacquered table of a room Yu Yan has never seen before, and the prayers run themselves like a steady reel of film undulating down Yu Yan’s throat each night the clock resets. This is how Yuxin holds ground for them both when they're lying awake in their own bunks, and on _some_ nights, sleep does become achievable.

Taipei hadn't been completely burned down by the fifth Kaiju attack in history when Chengxuan had been a child, but she knew what loss felt like too. By comparison, she still has a more substantial amount of faith by the fact that she's actually been visiting the temple in Wong Tai Sin every other week.

“Do you want to come with me? You and Yuxin,” Chengxuan asks one day at lunch in the mess hall. It’s half-emptied out by now, scraping of benches and tables whenever someone moves out louder in the background. Yuxin has already left for the kwoon to help with new recruits today, voluntarily.

"Okay. Sure, why not?" Yu Yan finally replies. 

Outside the sky is a burnt pink, etched with the oncoming purple of dusk by the time they leave base at the end of the day. From where they are on the temple’s street, is the far-off silhouette down the end of the road of a Kaiju’s stone head for worship by cultists that call Jaeger pilots false prophets against their so-called angry horrific angels. 

“I don’t really blame anyone for believing in practically anything,” Yuxin says, having turned back to wait for Chengxuan to keep up with them through the weekend crowd.

“It’s the end of the world. We only pray for one thing,” Yu Yan surmises, shielding her face against the fading orange sun rays bleeding insistent over them. She looks away when the warm light travels over Chengxuan’s profile, like the blinds of a crooked shutter through the buildings when she climbs the stairs up to the red pillars toward the smell of incense burning. The incense never ever stops burning here. 

  
  
  
  
  


As recruits, Chengxuan having been the only other early bird too in the combat room at the time was how they got round to talking. Yu Yan doesn’t remember if they’d consider themselves friends, not having spoken so much outside of training anyway. Her mum had asked how old Chengxuan was when she'd seen the photo, and Yu Yan heard the click of her tongue like static popping through the phone: _a beautiful girl as young as her shouldn't be here._ To be fair, if circumstances were kinder then maybe all of them wouldn't have to be here fighting for humanity.

“Yu Yan. Are you”— Yuxin stops. Hesitates like she always does when she’s being careful of how to phrase things.

Even when Yuxin probably knows what’s up anyway when their memories and minds have melded into something so weirdly convoluted that no language is appropriate to describe the kind of mirth dancing in Yuxin's eyes when she peers at Yu Yan. 

“What’s up?” Yu Yan asks, shoots Yuxin a glance just to see her shake her head. They’re minutes away from a battle in Echo Saber's conn-pod, waiting for the cue to initiate neural handshake.

“We got this. Clear your mind, I’ve seen enough,” Yuxin says off-hand, putting on the helmet. 

“Mind your own business,” Yu Yan laughs. 

For the first time in a long time, sans the unrelenting quickening of her pulse that’s due to rising adrenaline she gets before every battle, there is a kind of fear that makes your heart feel like lead and your feet numb. This fear feels both familiar and so wholly foreign.

Because fighting the end of the world means people relearn the most valuable resource given.

“And what's most valuable?” Yu Yan asks. She thumbs the veins over Chengxuan’s wrist and twirls the pen in her hand. It's dark outside, rain clouds travelling through over the city throughout the day.

“It’s time,” Chengxuan says. The wisps of tiny hair around her hairline curl upwards, won’t stay down. Yu Yan keeps her hands on Chengxuan’s wrist even if she wants so badly to press the stubborn strands down behind her ear, tug at the pale shell of Chengxuan’s lobe to hear her laugh. She does anyway, pearly teeth flashing and Yu Yan imagines running her tongue along them. She'll doze off in Chengxuan's room trying to mentally shelve all this away.

If circumstances were a little kinder, and timing didn't feel as heavy as the clock ticking numbers, Yu Yan would be a little more proactive. Would have willingly let years of restraint and self-discipline she prides herself on undo themselves by the days she spends wanting something like this.

Yuxin internalises most things well enough that they're buried away out of necessity; on top of being compatible, it made drifting so much easier. Half the psych tests back then still felt like bullshit, but their sparring matches and consequently piloting together made sense. Because they're both the kind of people who'd raze through the Pacific ocean without any doubt for what matters the most to them. And then there are the effects of ghost drifting—how much could Yuxin feel from her, and how deep does it go?

So Yuxin didn't laugh when Yu Yan asked a question: "What if you wanted to keep someone around for yourself, for as long as possible?"

She heard Yuxin shuffle around beneath her bunk. Talking about this reminded Yu Yan of someone—an ex-girlfriend—that she’s seen once from Yuxin’s memories like the ghost of a dream.

"You keep living," Yuxin simply replied.

  
  
  
  
  


At exactly 0200 hours at sea, Yu Yan feels it first. Searing hot like a knife grafted and dulled down considerably through the drivesuit when the Kaiju's ugly jagged teeth drips blue and manages to dent their metal. By the time the fucker finally reels backwards after Yuxin aims a clean shot with the plasmacaster at the underbelly, the Marshal’s voice on the comms blares through.

“We’re deploying backup—we’re running on the clock at almost three hours, rangers, you need to fall back,” he tells them urgently. 

Three hours up against a category four, that they’re encountering themselves for the first time, is pushing it. For all they know, three hours could have been four or six with the strain on their neural link intensifying every grating blow Clawhook gives back, until the bright blue liquid from its mouth actually seeps through the cracks in Echo Saber’s left shoulder, metal armour dissolving. 

“How much time do we have left?” Yu Yan asks. It’s taking gargantuan and almost painful effort to take a step back. The Kaiju stalks, lingers before them in the ocean after being knocked back, like a growling dog. Wounded as well but still angry and waiting to lunge at them again.

“You’re awfully optimistic,” Yuxin comments as the system voice parrots _critical damage_ at them, but Yu Yan can hear the smile in her voice.

"I'm trying to be." 

As soon as one of them—or both of them—think this isn’t going to last, their communication line with LOCCENT cuts out, and Echo Saber loses power.

It’s when they’re washed up on the shores of god knows where, that Yu Yan realises the flashes of red she’s seeing is blood under Yuxin’s nose. 

Yu Yan stays conscious long enough through the smell of copper, and spits out blood lined along her own teeth, and a shallow tear and gash across her suit. The after-effects of the damage to Echo’s chest plate had reverberated through their suits back in the conn-pod. In her mind’s eye, she sees incense smoke, ashes and a waterfall in Guizhou. And then it’s red temple pillars against blood orange sunlight, fingers sticky with longan juice and smudged ink against skin, and this is how she knows these ones are her own memories.

“I don’t think we’re that far away,” Yuxin says, holding Yu Yan’s head steady on her lap. There’s a kind of desperation in her tone Yu Yan has never really heard before, not like this. Yu Yan wonders how strong the fear is when it's culled from love or something close to it, from wanting to stay alive for it. 

The sky sees its first rays of sunlight, both gentle and unforgiving in the way it kisses the ocean’s horizon before she loses consciousness. 

  
  


Yu Yan wakes up on a hospital bed, numb and prickling with the strange sensation of the cool sheets against her bare legs and she wonders whatever happened to her drivesuit, which Yuxin laughs about from another bed when she voices this.

After they get released, the one person who isnt in their unexpected welcoming party when they return to base (which included the Marshal commending them for their courage with the perpetual hardened crease in his brow), is holed up in her room, still weak from a fever tiding over.

The timing of it doesn’t stop Yu Yan (with encouragement from Yuxin) from coming over the next morning, with hot tong sui that she carefully places on the desk after Chengxuan lets her in, eyes wide and hair still uncombed. 

Chengxuan buries her face into Yu Yan’s neck, arms like a vice around Yu Yan’s waist later on. She closes her eyes against the cool light right above, bright and blinding. “You don’t have to be scared,” Yu Yan says. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“What are _you_ afraid of?” Chengxuan asks against her throat. 

If she smiles, Yu Yan would feel the flat of her teeth on the skin there. Her mouth goes dry and swallows down the sweetness of the tong sui she had. Her fingers dig into the curve of Chengxuan’s warm and solid waist. 

Yu Yan presses her mouth softly on Chengxuan’s cheek, down her jaw up to the space below her ear. When she stops, Chengxuan is looking at her like she’s the most incredible thing she’s ever seen, eyes shining and dark, level of miracle-worthy or something like that. She’s so still when Yu Yan cups her chin, until her mouth parts open as Yu Yan touches the corner of her lips with her thumb.

“Running out of time,” Yu Yan answers, just before Chengxuan pulls her in.

  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
